It is as if HN users expect the news headline to be: "an event occurs which is statistically speaking non-anomalous".
If one doesn't feel we have enough data to draw conclusions yet, then sure, fine. But a person just died. This is a newsworthy story and it deserves our best attention and discussion, not repetition of something obvious ad nauseam.
When the sensational-to-informational ratio is so large, we always get this.
Is there a term for this tendency? Curious to read the research on it.
Alan Kay pointed out that Kahnemann's slow-system vs. fast-system also applies here.
The fact that Uber's self-driving car program has a worse deaths-per-miles-driven metric than human drivers is anything but obvious to me.
After an incident like this, it's natural to question whether anything needs to be done policy-wise. And, I don't see any reason why that discussion can't take place here in the comments section.
It seems like you want HN users to use the comments section to express condolences? Or, to just have an empty comments section?
Do I understand you correctly that you'd be okay with the comments if the were just prefixed with some "thoughts-and-prayers" genuflection? And if so, why not say it directly?
It's not the lack of compassion, it's the lack of substance.
And I suppose it strikes me as lacking compassion and/or humility to come and use HN as a platform to recycle the same obvious idea, when the story is about a death. It would be different if it were about a tire blowing out.
Everyone knows how these statistics work on a macro level. That's not worth commenting here on HN, and especially not on this story.
I just think we could do better.
>Everyone knows how these statistics work on a macro level. That's not worth commenting here on HN, and especially not on this story.
If statistical comparisons were obvious, and people didn't overreact with unjustifiable countermeasures, then indeed it wouldn't be important to make the point. But the world we live in is one where nuclear deaths are scarier than heart disease deaths, and shark attacks more than auto collisions.
I think you're committing the fallacy of "my social circle doesn't make that mistake, therefore it's not worth pointing out."
I can agree that users should be more careful about making the common point when others have made it, though -- I had a reply on this thread about "Uber flouted the $150 license" that I deleted when I saw others made a more informed response to the same point.
I haven't even read any of the comments on this story yet, and this type of pro-self-driving-car response is what I expect to be in the majority. That and anything anti-Uber :)
Would you care that statistically self-driving cars have killed less people than human drivers?
For example it's clearly excusable to be angry / depressed / looking for someone to blame when a personal tragedy happens to you. But that doesn't mean you should replicate that behaviour when a tragedy happens to someone else. We should distance ourselves from subjects where we're emotionally compromised, not guide our decision by the example of emotionally compromised people.
I realise that the point you're making is about emotional turmoil and not really statistics, but it looks like so far Uber aren't doing so well in terms of driving safety:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620736
So yeah, if it turned out that Uber were sending cars out into the world without sufficient engineering or testing* and they killed someone (especially someone I know) then I would be understandably furious.
* In order to get to market sooner? I don't trust Uber and I wouldn't put this past them. Nothing I have seen of the Uber self-driving car program makes me want to be anywhere near one on a road.
I don't think there are enough data points right now to make such claim, but please correct me if I am wrong.
This death is a tragedy. There were 37,461 such tragedies in 2016. Every single one of them matters equally. It is only by studying and analysing them in aggregate that we can prevent future tragedies. Seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, median dividers and rumble strips are tremendous acts of compassion. Statisticians, scientists and engineers have made an incalculable contribution to human welfare.
Shit, of course. But I'd like to believe that I'll realize that banning self-driving cars is not going to make things any better, just like I'd never propose banning cars in general. I'm not sure how it would help here to imagine it's my daughter; it's not as if we imagine it being our daughter in every traffic accident we hear of, since that would be crippling given the sheer number of them...
What do we do differently based on the answer to that question?
How you would react when emotionally distraught shouldn’t be the model for how you act all the time.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The only strange thing in this thread is the emotional detachment many are showing and one could probably argue that's the exact kind of thinking that will lead to more cases like this.
Lot's of people are talking as if human beings are a resource which exploitation should be secured for the businesses and technical curiosities.
No, people, humans are what matters and it just happens that there are business opportunities and scientific curiosities. No, it not O.K. to kill few people to speed up the development of self-driving vehicles. No, it is not O.K. to have total surveillance so that we improve AI.
We need to start cleaning our own house, or it’s going to be cleaned for us by people with agendas and little understanding of what they’re cleaning!
Is arguably the whole problem with our industry in a nutshell. The more relevant and largely ignored question should be "how this affects human beings".
If you ask a question "through the lense of technology" ("Can we solve this hard computer-vision problem"?) you arrive at different answers to those you would get if you ask the question through (say) the lense of societal benefits or humanity's relationship to technology ("Is it ok for a badly programmed computer to accidentally kill someone"?).
I say this not to criticise the enormous benefit this technology could bring, but rather to provoke us to think about the implications of the technologies that we are creating outside the confines of an IDE.
That this event doesn't necessarily reflect a larger trend is not incorrect--it's just that it's obvious. That self-driving cars could potentially reduce fatalities in the future is not only obvious, it's also somewhat off-topic when the story is that a person just died.
So my question is, when a computer kills a person, can't we do better? Better than stating the obvious, and better than being dismissive.
edit: NM, I can see where you'd see that, even though I argue that both being concerned about the death, and wanting to defend Uber, aren't mutually exclusive. Instead of saying "this story is only relevant to HN", I should have said, "this story is only noticed by HN and the national media". Which is true, as far as I can tell. I can recall few nationwide stories about other pedestrian deaths, even though nearly 6,000 occur every year.
You have to recognize that your culture and your moral standards are not universal and you are in no position to force them on everyone else. It is also foolish to expect everyone across the globe to react in a certain way to certain things.
On the other hand, death topics is the side of HN that is heavily biased towards what mods feel about it and their culture. They even ban accounts and give out warnings if you happen to disagree with them and react differently. So there is not much sense to even discuss this.
Not implying that the lack of empathy is in anyway acceptable, but people should know that when machines are involved in such scenarios it is much easier for them to distance themselves emotionally, this is not new, weapons are a prime example of this. Maybe by knowing this dilemma people can react better to such tragedies.
I hope people show more empathy knowing this.
We need to see accountability for any death caused by a car being operated by a computer. We need to see integrity in testing and metrics that show that these are actually safer for humanity. One more death than expected due to software vs human is too many.
I don't remember where I saw it but the process for creating mission critical software at NASA is insane. They analyze everything. It's a completely different and slower process than the one we use for building websites. SpaceX has probably increased the productivity of said systems, but I'd like to see how they develop mission critical software to keep things safe.
The point of self driving cars is to reduce death, if you can monetize that great, but if you can't hit that baseline in some sort of testable way, then you shouldn't be able to put your car on the road.
The victim's life had meaning. To herself, to her friends and loved ones, and all of those affected by her untimely loss. We don't know her story, nor the stories of the over 6,000 pedestrians (a number that's been increasing) killed annually in the US alone as of 2016.[0] Nor the 37,461 killed in US motor vehicle crashes in the same year.[1]
We talk about the technology, because it was involved in this woman's death and because the technology has the potential to drastically reduce the overall number of such accidents. Understanding why she died, and how similar accidents can be prevented in the future, can give society back something out of an accident that only took. If we can learn from her death, anything at all, it behooves us to do so.
Yes, it's cold. It's extremely cold. But it's something doable. Even if these discussions offer little impact on the actual development of self-driving cars, they can still impact the political debate that's only now just starting. For better or worse, there will be those who point to this woman's death as an argument against the technology. Recognizing that her death is not simply one death, but an example of a type of incident that claims thousands each year without self-driving car involvement, is critically important. At times, statistics can dehumanize and cause us to overlook the very real pain depicted as a small part of a number. But at the same time, they also permit us to recognize problems and measures ways in which we can mitigate and even solve them.
0. https://www.npr.org/2017/03/30/522085503/2016-saw-a-record-i...
1. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
People are being killed in accidents constantly. We aren't going to be in a constant state of mourning over it.
This is implicitly a discussion about autonomous vehicles, and the very currently relevant and heated topic of wether we want these things on our streets.
There are about 260M[1] cars in the us in 2015, so perhaps more today. That means there are ~4e-7 deaths per car per day. On the other hand, we have 1e-3 deaths per autonomous vehicles per day if we naively use the death of the person in this story. That means so far, autonomous vehicles have a rate of killing people a ~2500 times that of normal cars.
Of course, it's one data point, but out the gate, it's not looking so strong.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/21/14687346/uber-self-drivin...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...
>'How low has the SW development bar gone, if "it's okay" now means "at least it's not directly killing people"?' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16541235
We now see the standard has slipped to: "Is the death of one person relatively so bad? People die every day."
Next a large crowd of people will be killed and the standard will become: "It's not so bad compared to creating skynet or starting thermonuclear war."
I'm not sure what comes after that.
I don't know, however, how that comparison turns out. From the other comments, it looks like Uber's self-driving cars might be less safe than human-driven cars--in which case you and I would end up on the same side of the argument.
You can make the same argument that people die in non-VR surgery all the time so it is no such a big deal.
But if you think about it, that's not a pattern anyone should be unfamiliar with. History is full of it.
I don't know, I really have no strong opinion here. But I think stuff like this is truly fascinating. There seems no end to where rationalization can go.
Welcome to the ambivalence of reality...
I mean, we two are still capable of discussing it, at least!
no. there's a reason our community has the reputation of being heartless. it's because it's true.
What is true is that large internet forums suffer from systemic effects that compound into problems that no one has yet figured out how to deal with.
what in the world did you think i meant?
you can try and pretend all you want, it ain't my fault if the mirror ain't a pretty thing to behold.
How many self-driving cars are there on the roads right now? And what's fatality rate? I' quite sure it's higher now than compared to human-only driver.
> they are unavoidable sometimes
Were autonomous cars not designed to prevent such situations?
>Let's, as a community, set the standard for how we will react to these events
Yes and let's punish non-conformists!
> which gets posted on HN whenever a self-driving article comes out.
I honestly have no idea what that comment is.
NHTSA data measures number of fatalities by the hundreds of millions of miles driven -- the latest rate being 1.18 fatalities per 100 million miles: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat...
Those are not people I want in my engineering community; just impossible to trust they'd make the right calls and have the right priorities in developing cool new stuff.
Yes, we get it. Fatalities will happen sometimes, they are unavoidable sometimes, and what matters in the long run is if we can achieve a significant overall reduction in fatalities.
But my god, a person was just killed by a computer. Can't we have some compassion and humility?
Let's, as a community, set the standard for how we will react to these events. Let's make sure Uber releases detailed data on what happened, whether they were at fault or not. Let's hold the media accountable for their reporting. Let's mourn the loss of life and think about how we can solve these problems.
But for christ's sake, please stop posting the same thing everybody already knows, which gets posted on HN whenever a self-driving article comes out.
Can't we do better?
---
EDIT: I clarified what I meant here [1]
Wasn't trying to say this thread should be all about mourning. This is HN so we should talk about technology, even when a person died. I'm pointing out one specific argument that gets repeated over and over in place of a substantive discussion, and I think we can do better.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621589